Entry screening is an intuitive barrier for the prevention of infected people entering a country or region. However, evidence on its effectiveness remains limited and given its lack of specificity, it generates a high overhead of screened travellers uninfected with the targeted pathogen [5]. For example, when entry screening was implemented in Australia in response to the 2003 SARS outbreak, 1.84 million people were screened, 794 were quarantined, and no cases were confirmed [12]. While some cases of 2019-nCoV infection have been identified through airport screening in the current outbreak, our estimates indicate that likely more infected travellers have not been detected by screening.